Some might doubt the stadium credentials of a band so associated with angsty teenage loneliness as The Cure. Can the personal and intimate connection to fans nurtured in millions of individual bedrooms translate to a crowd comprising tens of thousands?

Under Wembley Arena’s cavernous roof tonight, such concerns initially seem justified. Opener Out of this World, its droning intro issuing forth from an empty stage, seems a laconically misguided first step, failing to catch fire even as the black-clad heroes of the hour appear to rapturous applause. The show gets right on track immediately afterwards, however. With the trademark hook-laden synth-rock of Pictures of You, the veteran band begin to underline both the enormous songbook of hits they’ve built up over the course of a 40-year career, and a precision in performance honed during more than 70 dates that have preceded this one on a world tour celebrating that landmark.

The backcombed hair and heavy-handed approach to makeup that made him a cultural idol are no doubt a help, but Robert Smith gives no hint that he’s approaching 60. Rolling back the years with soaring, yearning vocals and uniquely fey stage presence, he leads masterful renditions of classics such as Lovesong and In Between Days (with no hint of irony as he belts out “Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die”.), holding the sell-out crowd in the palm of his hand.

While Smith is the only remaining founding member of The Cure, those around him still bring decades of experience to bear. Reeves Gabrels’s intricate effects-laden guitar lines weave beautifully with the frontman’s own rhythms, particularly on cuts from the group’s grungier 90s catalogue, such as From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea. Simon Gallup, with a frenetic punk presence slightly at odds with the understated calm of his bandmates, lays down bass lines that fill the room to the roof (and, in the case of A Forest, threaten to take it off).

No fewer than three encores crown a mammoth set, and provide the adoring masses the opportunity for joyous dancing to hits such as TheLovecats, Friday I’m in Love, and Boys Don’t Cry. Happy, sweaty, tired, those in attendance left having witnessed not only a true icon of British rock history, but also one of the best live acts on tour in 2016.

In tribute to the irreplaceable Leonard Cohen, who died last week aged 82, Laura and I reviewed his final album, You Want it Darker. The below was originally published by Flux Magazine, and is available here.

Can there be any nobler way of putting one’s affairs in order than by composing an album that confronts the ghosts of one’s past and appeals to God himself?

Like David Bowie a few short months ago with the instantly seminal Blackstar, it seems Leonard Cohen transcended this mortal coil having left an emphatic swan song echoing in his wake.

A reflection of the lifelong quest for spiritual meaning which permeated much of Cohen’s work, and which saw the Canadian Jew ordained a Zen Buddhist Monk in 1996, You Want It Darker is a tapestry of religious imagery, of demons and angels, old testament and new.

Cohen’s own mortality is confronted most urgently on the title and opening track, in which a driving moody bassline is punctuated with the chant of “Hineni” (meaning “Here I Am. Send Me!” in Hebrew) followed by “I am ready, my Lord”. It’s the steeling of a man prepared to meet his maker. “If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame;” so goes a stand-out line, as, confronted with infinity, its author realises his fragility. Weighty of theme though the track may be, it underlines Cohen’s continuing relevance as a writer of instantly memorable pop songs.

Another of You Want it Darker’s stark admissions, “I struggled with some demons / they were middleclass and tame” is mirrored in the track Leaving the Table with the line “You’ve got these excuses / they’re tired and lame”. Accompanied by a traditional Cohen arrangement of folksy, melancholic guitar, it features a voice full of resignation and ends with the semblance of a dying breath.

Further biblical pictures are to be found in Treaty. Over choppy, marching strings, Cohen conjures “water into wine” and “snake baffled by sin”, recalling his oft-covered masterpiece Hallelujah. In Travelling Light, concise and deliberate stanzas overlay trilling flamenco guitar. “I used to play / one mean guitar”, he wistfully reminds us.

A moment’s respite from such existential angst, On the Level offers sonic redemption through the soothing velvety harmonies of a gospel choir. A riff that again nods to Hallelujah, simplistic and hopeful, runs beneath.

Cohen’s sublime vocals seem more gravel-toned than ever (once a tenor, his ever-deepening voice is here unrecognisable from his early albums). This unique tool is used in Steer Your Way to great effect, matching the bassline for depth in a march over lilting guitar.

Produced from his home and finished in the twilight of his dwindling days, this is a parting gift from a legend who continued making music right up until the curtain fell. The subjects aren’t new; Cohen has always sung heart breaking laments interwoven with transcending poetry, but You Want it Darker is the culmination. It’s the last projection from a mind long used to probing the spiritual world for answers to the big questions, by way of synagogue and of mountain monastery, always heading towards this final moment.

Amy’s head swam. The scene visible to her through the windscreen, ever-evolving as she drove steadily through the busy shopping precinct of Dorset Road, appeared to play out in super slow motion. On the pavements framing her view at either side, pedestrians moved lethargically to-and-fro with leaden steps, as if submerged to the knee in glue. Beside them, cyclists rolled by at such lugubrious pace as to cause her to wonder how they were managing to stay upright. A passing flock of migratory birds dappled the pale blue winter sky above, passing across it with an eerie sluggishness. With the perception of having more time in which to absorb their messages, the text on billboards and road signs stood out in vivid relief against the otherwise sedate visual backdrop. Quite against her will, Amy began to obsessively rearrange the words and letters into component anagrams as she encountered them.

The most torturous aspect of this strangely altered sense of time was the age that seemed to stretch between the first appearance of each article of oncoming traffic on the distant horizon and its passing out of her vision through the window to her right. During each such yawning expanse of time, Amy found herself obsessing about them too. As each new vehicle came into her view, she was unable to prevent herself from noting the make and model, taking mental record of the physical appearance of each occupant within, and then imagining with brutal, visceral detail meeting them in a succession of abrupt and catastrophic head-on collisions.

Time and time again in Amy’s mind’s eye, cars, trucks, and buses veered from their sedate path along the opposite carriageway and careered toward her. Drawn in with magnetic attraction, each vehicle slammed into the front of the little hatchback that she was piloting in angry clouds of broken glass, twisted steel, and fire. Despite the violence, serene silence reigned, because the radio was broken and because the recurring carnival of metal-on-metal carnage existed only in the realm of woozy daydream, inspired by nothing more tangible than nervous anxiety and the memory of a thousand action movie car chases and a hundred road safety campaign ads.

Stirred from the succession of dark fantasies, Amy suddenly became acutely aware of the way her sweaty palms were slipping on the steering wheel; of how her imperfect, organic clamminess was failing against the cool and stolid precision-engineered rubber. She tightened her grip until it hurt, her elbows locked at right angles and her hands fixed steadfastly in the textbook-approved positions of ten and two o’clock. Through subtle yet deliberate shifting of her shoulders, she made what adjustments were necessary to maintain her trajectory along the straight road with the grim determination of a sailor at the helm of a storm-swept galleon.

‘Only a fool breaks the two second rule,’ Amy said in a low whisper as she eased off the accelerator in response to the slowing traffic ahead of her, the tension in her voice would have been obvious were its volume not so slight. Forming the words seemed an alien process. Her mouth was dry and her tongue felt enormous. She detected movement to her left and with it, the stark sudden realisation of her predicament drew an involuntary snigger. She bit her apparently massive tongue to suppress the full-bodied laugh that threatened to grow from this rapidly dawned and hysterical new sense of her predicament. There was no doubt about it now. Amy was spectacularly, hopelessly, completely-and-utterly stoned.

‘At the traffic lights, make a left-hand turn please,’ said the examiner.

With the end in sight, Nathan had inspected the fruits of his considerable effort, stubbed out his joint, and, exhaling, beamed with pride and anticipation. Spread out across every available horizontal plane in the kitchen were open packets, wrappers, and boxes representing the veritable smorgasbord of sugary confections which had been blended in imprecise, fist-sized, proportions into a large Pyrex mixing bowl that he then set about licking clean.

Nathan had surmised that the secret of a good pot brownie was to ensure that the principle active ingredient was sufficiently masked as for the flavour to give no hint toward the psychotropic delights in store for the consumer.

Some twenty years of experience as a consumer (both of cannabis and of internet documentaries of varying degrees of scientific veracity) had instilled a sense within Nathan that eating his beloved weed was an entirely different kettle of fish to smoking it. If he was remembering the biology correctly, this was due the different metabolic processes that played out in the liver as compared to the lungs. That’s why he had been extra careful with the dose.

Careful that is, until he forgot adding that dose to the mixture at all, and so measured, and added, a second of precisely the same size.

Nathan was in the kitchen once again when Amy came home the following afternoon. It was around four, which meant he was newly awake and going through his morning ritual: sitting in his underpants on his stool at the counter, reading last night’s Evening Standard, and eating a giant portion of cereal from the same mixing bowl that he had used in the previous evening’s bake.

From atop the fridge the radio blared, the volume so loud as to distort the voices of both the talk show DJ and the angry cockney gentleman with whom he was arguing for reasons that were not clear. Amy turned it off and, throwing her handbag and keys down beside it, confronted her boyfriend.

‘Nathan, why am I stoned?’

‘Pardon?’ he replied, buying himself time to process the information overload presented by this sudden question which he had not fully understood. He recognised all the words it contained – some of them were very dear to him in fact – yet the angry tone and the context of Amy using it to announce her presence to him were too much for his sleepy brain to decode right away.

‘You heard me. Why am I stoned?’

The time-buying tactic had worked its magic. Not only did Nathan now understand the question, he was also confident that he knew answer to it. Those brownies, the crowning achievement of his week, had been at the forefront of his mind since they came out of the oven.

‘You ate the brownies!’ said Nathan. The excitement in his voice the result both of solving the riddle at the first time of asking, and of learning that the undoubted pleasures of his culinary masterpiece had reached an audience beyond his own plate.

Amy, her face reddening in, gestured toward the counter where the Tupperware containing the offending snacks still sat. The note to which she referred was made in handwriting they both knew to be Nathan’s, and was exactly as clear and succinct as she was suggesting. The two short words, rendered in block capital letters, were even accompanied by competent, if somewhat childlike, drawing of a face, smiling invitingly.

‘My question is, how was I meant to guess that eating the brownies was going to send me into outer space?’

Nathan slowly and sheepishly stood up, wiping milk from around his mouth. The stool emitted a low groan as it slid back against the tiled floor, as if trying to disassociate itself from him.

‘It’s… “Eat me.” it’s a reference to Alice in Wonderland,’ he offered meekly. ‘You know – the part where she eats the cake and grows. Or does she shrink? I don’t remember exactly, but the point was supposed to be that-‘

‘Alice in Wonderland?’ Amy interjected. ‘Of course! Please excuse me for not picking up on your literary reference Stephen Fry!’ She adjusted her arm – until that moment still pointing at the box of brownies. Nathan followed her gesture with his gaze, all the way to wall calendar hanging by the door. The one handwritten mark it bore was circled and underlined in red. She didn’t have to speak.

‘Your driving test,’ he said solemnly, the full repercussions of his carelessness becoming clear to him.

‘That’s right,’ she said, curtly. She grew redder still and her forehead furrowed. It appeared to Nathan that she was holding back an intense inner rage. All the same, he had to know for sure.

‘So… how did you do?’ he asked.

With that, the levy broke, and from Amy burst forth the fit of untameable, uproarious, primal laughter that she had somehow managed to supress ever since that left-hand turn on Dorset Road.

With Britain electing to leave the EU by a narrow majority and America soon to be presented with the option of voting for Donald Trump to be their president, there’s a sense that the western world has entered a new era of starkly polarising politics. An Insignificant Man, a powerful new documentary from writing/directing duo Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla, suggests that the political landscape of India has become a battleground divided along lines of equally fundamental discord.

The film charts the rise of anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the newly-formed Aam Aadmi party (English translation: Common Man’s party), and rank-outsider challenger in the 2013 assembly elections for the Indian capital of Delhi. Though he’s fiercely opposed by opponents invested in a status quo so amoral as to openly bribe impoverished voters with cash and booze, the charismatic but humble Kejriwal soon becomes an unlikely champion to a disenfranchised people.

While the many parallels between Kejriwal’s ascent and that of socialist contemporaries such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn will provide a touchstone for western audiences, An Insignificant Man also acts as a primer on the unique social climate in the world’s second most populous nation. Of particular influence is the ancient “caste system”; given legal credence during colonisation by the British, it remains the basis for widespread prejudice and subjugation of the poor majority, 60 years on from independence. Incumbent in the role to which Kejriwal aspires, the Congress party’s Sheila Dikshit embodies the sneeringly elitist establishment with a near-pantomime degree of malevolence: in one pre-election interview, she asks “what is his status?” – freely dismissing her challenger.

A markedly candid style ensures the tone of the movie remains vivid and vital, never descending into the realms of the fusty social history lesson. With no voice-over or cutaway explanatory graphics, the only contextual information is presented via snippets of genuine news bulletins that intersect the footage in direct response to the issues raised on Kejriwal’s campaign trail. This real-time approach ensures the tempo of conflict, intrigue, and drama continues to build right up to the ever-approaching climax of the Delhi electorate’s date with destiny.

Serving both as a window into a compelling relevant mass political awakening and as an example of white-knuckle narrative structure, An Insignificant Man is a masterful example of the art of documentary.

The document I chose to write about through this activity – a letter of sorts – is Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. (the website behind that link; ‘Letters of Note’, is a goldmine of potential inspiration by the way).

As you probably know, Cobain took his own life in 1994 at the age of 27, with his band, Nirvana, at the pinnacle of international rock music success. The suicide note found next to Cobain’s body was addressed to ‘Boddah’; an imaginary friend from his childhood.

There is inherent tension within the soon-to-be-realised threat of self-destruction the note contains. Though rather muddled (the rambling form is a reflection of the sorry mental state of a man whose lyrics often contained powerfully succinct poetry), it appears to be an attempt by Cobain to articulate the internal conflict that has brought him to this darkest hour. It addresses the conflict between his ostensibly blessed life of success and adulation and the deep depression he finds himself battling. In trying to explain the decision to end his life, he highlights the contrast between his outlook as a carefree, loving, and enthusiastic youth and his final hours as a deeply tortured soul ‘numb’ to the world. He notes that the same loving spirit apparent in his daughter only serves as a bitter reminder of what he was. He also refers to fellow rock star Freddie Mercury as a contrasting example of someone who was able to ‘relish’ the trappings of fame in a way he himself is unable to do.

In response, one could perhaps write a direct reply to the letter, in an imagined effort to dissuade Cobain from the action he was intent on. There’s also potential for prose exploring the happy adolescence the letter refers to and how a dark fate hung over it. One could also write focussing on the reference to Freddie Mercury, contrasting vastly different ways the two stars handled their fame, or even imagining a conversation between the two in the afterlife.

I chose to draft a short poem from the perspective of the imaginary character of Boddah. Echoing Cobain’s words as an ethereal part of his own psyche, but also as an old friend greeting him in his final moment.

As well as a short course science module (Galaxies, stars and planets: S177), my final work toward my degree will be A363: Advanced Creative Writing. It’s recommended that students start a blog to record some of the work they produce in the course, and this was a large part of the motivation for maninthesand.com.

The module opened on a discussion of genre, and the first short piece of writing I produced was in response to the instruction to write in continuation of the following (provided) paragraph of prose:

The church clock strikes eight, so those villagers who are awake know without checking that it is six. A cock crows. A body lies across the doorstep of a church, a line of crumb-carrying ants marches across the fedora covering his face. There is a serene, momentary quiet after the chimes cease. A figure glides past the church wall, before the silence is cracked by a baby crying.

A list of suggested titles was presented and students were asked to write with the genre suggested by the title they chose in mind. I wrote the following under the title:

The Life History of Guillermo Brown

Then the scene before me shifts and I’m viewing the sky from below. Shock at the instantaneous change in perspective makes me gasp and there’s silence once more. A high-sided grey canyon encloses my vision from all sides. The same bright expanse I looked down from within before now appears above it, searing white. All around is warm.

Suddenly a shadow descends as an enormous dark shape fills my view from above. Instinctively my hand moves to shield my eyes from the light so as to perceive some identifying detail in the massive black expanse.

That’s when I notice my injuries. Both of my arms are heavy with swelling. My hands are pudgy pink bulbs and my sausage-like fingers sprout from them at uncomfortable angles, each one concealing a tiny bright fingernail at the end of their pillowy length, like a brass tack in a freshly upholstered sofa.

That’s when I notice my injuries…

In shock and fear of my grotesque appearance I vocalise a tiny, reedy warble that seems to instantly dry and constrict my throat. I make to clear it, but my cough too is muted to the same type of thin, wispy half-noise. I shift slightly in the hope of stretching out the kink in my windpipe, or larynx, or diaphragm or whatever it may be. Moving my torso provides a deeply unpleasant yet strangely familiar sensation and with it the unwelcome knowledge that I’m wearing a soiled nappy.

The next moment sends a chill of fear to the core of my being as three things dawn on me;